Knocked Up

Does size matter?

Judd Apatow's Knocked Up was probably the comedy of 2007, surfing a zeitgeist of male gen-X anxieties about growing up and more general anxieties about body, beauty and our culture's impossible standards of perfection - but one of the main criticisms faced by the film was its ungainly length. It may have compressed nine months of pregnancy into 129 minutes of screen time, but even in the era of Lord Of The Rings, that just seems too long for what is essentially a breezy romantic comedy.

Universal Pictures' lavish double-disc edition of Knocked Up gives the viewer an idea of just why the film ended up so long - and of how difficult it must have been not to make it even longer. For here there are literally hours and hours of deleted scenes, extended scenes, alternative scenes, raw footage scenes, deleted one-liners, deleted beard jokes, deleted ex tempore wig-outs by 'Dr Kuni', and gag reels - and they are all just as funny as what made it to the final cut.

It becomes clear that Knocked Up was shot fast and loose, with Apatow encouraging all his cast members to let rip with comic improvisations, and then hauling his epic-scale footage into a more manageable size through what must have been a brutal editing process. Watching all these high-quality off-cuts shows the sheer number of agonising sacrifices that Apatow had to make in order to deliver his baby. I struggle to think of any other film's rejected material that have made me laugh quite so long and hard.

The commentary by Apatow, star Seth Rogen and Bill Hader (the SNL alumnus who plays the editor at E!) reveals that Apatow's own wife (Leslie Mann) and daughters (Iris and Maude Apatow) play Alison's sister and nieces, and Ben's housemates are played by Rogen's actual long-time buddies (Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Martin Starr) and keep their real names. It explains the palpable chemistry between these characters - something that is not easily created from scratch. On another front, of his sex scene with Katherine Heigl, Rogen offers: "I tried not to sweat on her."

There is also a 'documentary' on shooting the rollercoaster sequences (and ride-phobic Jason Segel's "major freak-out"), a series of Apatow's brief on-set video diaries, a short featurette on 'missing' roommate Gummy (written out when the actor was offered the lead part in a Woody Allen movie that in fact got pulled), footage of Loudon Wainwright III performing some of the film's songs live at McCabe's, and Heigl's audition tape.

The only misjudged extras here are the two mock-featurettes, Directing The Director and Finding Ben Stone. Both begin with amusing enough ideas (in the former, director Bennett Miller is hired by Universal to rein in Apatow's excesses, while in the latter, Apatow auditions an unlikely assembly of actors to cast as Ben Stone); but they are too long (yes, that criticism again), still running long after their joke has worn very thin, and you are left with the impression that some concepts might just be better aborted.

Still, this is a riotously entertaining set of extras, compiled with care so that even the looped footage behind the menus is diverting. The main menu, eg, on disc one features Ben and Alison's just-the-right-side-of-goofy nightclub dance entirely uncut, while the sub-menu for language selection offers a rapid cut-up of Rogen's infectiously geeky laughs.

Fans of Knocked Up are likely to be truly satisfied – because here it is not just the size that counts, but the quality too.